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Notes -
Ugh, fine, I didn't read the essay at the time but I did now.
The question is whether the essay, which was bad, was bad enough to earn a 0/25 rather than a higher-but-still-low score like, I dunno, 2/25 or 5/25. "The soft sciences are sufficiently corrupted by ideology that their politically-relevant outputs should asymptote to a low level of Bayesian evidence" is a highly-plausible and highly-relevant proposition to discussing any research article that's come out of them, and she did hint at it; that's better than literally nothing. Grading does need to discriminate between different degrees of badness, after all, and in this specific case we have proof that the instructor was marking down due to taking personal offence at the positions taken:
(AP, emphasis mine)
I will note that, regardless of your opinion of the essay's quality, "writing a bad essay" is not a moral failure in the way that, say, plagiarism would be (even though plagiarism is not actually a crime)... or in the way that scientific fraud is. I'm not actually sure whether this is literally fraud in the legal sense; I don't know whether "you agree to not tamper with your data" was part of the contract to receive a research grant ("you agree to actually do the study" presumably is, but the study does appear to have been performed in all these cases). Nonetheless, it seems obvious to me that a university that allows its scientists to tamper with data would stop getting government grants in a hurry (because, well, the actual state interest in issuing research grants is to uncover scientific truths, not to produce papers full of literal lies; there are of course private funders who want to buy propaganda, but the state shouldn't be doing that) and thus it is reasonable for a university (at least, one that intends to continue performing government-funded research) to fire scientists that have repeatedly performed such tampering (and thus ensure that they don't do more of it).
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